As digital content continues to proliferate, management of digital assets becomes an increasingly difficult challenge. Enhancements in computer networking and database technology allow companies to manage large collections of images and other media and make the content available to third parties. While network communication provides a powerful tool to enable a database manager to share content with others, it makes it more difficult to control and track how the content is being used, and efficiently share the content.
Prior patent documents by the assignee of this patent application describe systems and methods of automated searching and digital watermark screening of media object files on computer networks like the internet. See, e.g., assignee's U.S. Pat. No. 5,862,260, which is hereby incorporated by reference. Software used to perform automated searching and compiling of internet content or links is sometimes referred to as a web crawler or spider.
Digital watermarking is a process for modifying media content to embed a machine-readable code into the data content. The data may be modified such that the embedded code is imperceptible or nearly imperceptible to the user, yet may be detected through an automated detection process. Most commonly, digital watermarking is applied to media such as images, audio signals, and video signals. However, it may also be applied to other types of data, including documents (e.g., through line, word or character shifting, background texturing, etc.), software, multi-dimensional graphics models, and surface textures of objects.
Digital watermarking systems have two primary components: an embedding component that embeds the watermark in the media content, and a reading component that detects and reads the embedded watermark. The embedding component embeds a watermark by altering data samples of the media content in the spatial, temporal or some other domain (e.g., Fourier, Discrete Cosine or Wavelet transform domains). The reading component analyzes target content to detect whether a watermark is present. In applications where the watermark encodes information (e.g., a message), the reader extracts this information from the detected watermark.
The present assignee's work in steganography, data hiding and digital watermarking is reflected, e.g., in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,862,260, 6,408,082 and 6,614,914; and in published specifications WO 9953428 and WO 0007356 (corresponding to U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,449,377 and 6,345,104). A great many other approaches are familiar to those skilled in the art. The artisan is presumed to be familiar with the full range of literature concerning steganography, data hiding and digital watermarking. The subject matter of the present application is related to that disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,862,260, 6,122,403 and in co-pending application Ser. No. 09/571,422 filed May 15, 2000, Ser. No. 09/620,019 filed Jul. 20, 2000, and Ser. No. 09/636,102 filed Aug. 10, 2000; which are hereby incorporated by reference.
As an extension of the watermark-based information retrieval described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,862,260 and marketed by Digimarc Corporation (e.g., under the trade name IMAGEBRIDGE), watermark decoders can be employed in a distributed fashion to perform watermark screening and interacting with watermarked media objects on networks, including the internet. For example, watermark decoders are deployed at a variety of locations on a computer network such as the internet, including in internet search engines that screen media objects gathered by each search engine, network firewalls that screen media objects that are encountered at the firewall, in local area networks and databases where spiders do not typically reach, in content filters, in client-based web-browsers, etc. Each of these distributed decoders acts as a spider thread that logs (and perhaps acts upon) watermark information. Examples of the types of watermark information include identifiers decoded from watermarks in watermarked media objects, media object counts, addresses of the location of the media objects (where they were found), and other context information (e.g., how the object was being used, who was using it, etc.). The spider threads, in turn, send their logs or reports to a central spider program that compiles them and aggregates the information into fields of a searchable database.
But the internet is vast. One challenge is to locate watermarked content throughout the web.
Thus, additional improvements are provided to even further explore the depths of the internet for watermark data.
Another challenge is to find and manage content stored locally on a user's computer or on her networked computers. Searching tools have recently emerged to allow a user to search and catalog files on her computer. Examples are Google's Google Desktop Search and Microsoft's MSN Desktop Search. We provide improvements to ensure that metadata associated with images and audio are current and easily indexable by such desktop searching tools.
One implementation includes a method including: from a first mobile device, wirelessly querying a second mobile device to determine whether the second mobile device has internet search results relating to predetermined search criteria; and receiving at least a subset of the search results.
Another implementation includes a method including: from a first wireless device, wirelessly communicating with a second wireless device to determine whether the second wireless device has performed an internet or database search; receiving, at the first wireless device, information from the second wireless device regarding the internet or database search, if the information satisfies predetermined criteria on the first wireless device, requesting at least a subset of results obtained from the internet or database search.
Yet another implementation includes a method including: receiving search criteria in a first, handheld mobile device; upon sensing a second, handheld mobile device by the first, handheld mobile device, automatically and wirelessly querying the second, handheld mobile device to determine whether the second, handheld mobile device has any content stored thereon corresponding to the search criteria; and receiving content corresponding to the search criteria from the second, handheld mobile device.
Further aspects, implementations, features and advantages will become even more apparent with reference to the following detailed description and accompanying drawing.